On the death of Antonio Skármeta: postman, ambassador, writer

As with so many Chileans, the country’s history has had an exemplary influence on Antonio Skármeta’s life. Born in 1940 in Antofagasta, northern Chile, Skármeta was a philosopher and aspiring writer, a supporter of Salvador Allende and his democratic-socialist experiment.

However, after its brutal suppression in 1973 and the military coup, he too was forced to leave his homeland. He went to Argentina for a short time, where things were no better, and finally to Germany, to West Berlin, which became Skármeta’s second home.

The Postman and Pablo Neruda

Here he worked as a playwright and screenwriter, and here he began writing his first novels. He then became world-famous with one of them, a touching, yet completely kitsch-free story that, not least, demonstrated how much its author longed for Chile, despite all the West Berlin well-being.

The novel was published in German in the mid-1980s under the title “With Burning Patience”; What made him really famous was his (then already second) film adaptation by the British director Michael Radford almost ten years later, with Philippe Noiret and Massimo Troisi in the leading roles: “Il Postino”, the postman.

The film title describes it better than the more poetic book title: In the novel, Skármeta told of the encounter between the Chilean writer and national hero Pablo Neruda and his postman in the central Chilean coastal town of Isla Negra, not far from Valpáraiso, where Neruda lived for a time and where one of his three houses is located. The main character is the young Mario Jiménez, who applies for the postman position in Isla Negra and basically only delivers mail to the only resident in the bay: Pablo Neruda.

He receives kilos of mail every day, and the two become friends. This goes so far that the famous writer advises his young postman on love matters and teaches him how to win a woman’s heart with language and individual verses. It is a beautiful, tender story that is told in “With Burning Patience,” and yet Skármeta does not leave out the politics and history of Chile: the time under Allende, when Neruda became ambassador in Paris, the Pinochet coup, the return Nerudas went to Chile, a year after he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he was already seriously ill.

In 2000 he became Chilean ambassador to Berlin

Like his great role model, Antonio Skármeta agreed to enter the diplomatic service for his country. As soon as Pinochet abdicated in 1989, he returned to Chile, finally becoming ambassador to Germany in 2000 and settling again in West Berlin.

This activity lasted three years. Meanwhile, Skármeta continued to write novels. The freedom of being a writer was more important to him. However, other of his books such as “The Poet’s Wedding” or “The Girl with the Trumpet” are not exactly masterpieces; But it is difficult to write a story like the Neruda Postman novel several times, especially after such a global success.

“My Friend Neruda” is the name of one of Skármeta’s last books, published in 2011. In it he deals with this again and talks about his encounters with Neruda as a budding journalist and writer, which not least led to “With Burning Patience”.

Then he asked Pablo Neruda in Isla Negra for a foreword for the novel, which would only be published so much later, and what did he answer at the door in front of which Skármeta was constantly hanging around: “If you wrote it, with the greatest pleasure .” Now Antonio Skármeta has died in Santiago de Chile. He was 83 years old.